How KitchenAid revealed the “end-to-end” global consumer journey

To achieve sales and marketing goals, brands need to know how customers make purchase decisions. But another key element of the consumer journey is often overlooked: the post-purchase experience. KitchenAid, a premium kitchen appliances brand, knew they needed to look beyond the point of purchase to uncover opportunities to build customer loyalty and grow their business globally. 

KitchenAid had previously done some shopper research focused on the US, but needed to expand their knowledge and action plans globally, and recognized that a lot has changed in the way people shop and use appliances since they did their initial research, pre-COVID. 

How could KitchenAid make sense of “messy” consumer journeys and experiences and uncover new opportunities to delight their customers?

At the Corporate Researchers Conference (CRC) in Chicago, KitchenAid’s Global Head of Consumer Insights, Nicole Whitlow, revealed how the company created a global, end-to-end consumer journey framework in partnership with SKIM. Elizabeth Kadrich, Senior Research Manager at SKIM, shared how advanced analytics transformed the understanding of the consumer journey and delivered actionable outcomes.

Read on for more learnings from the discussion.

KitchenAid’s challenge: untangle the global consumer journey & post-purchase customer experience

With a goal of growing sales volume around the world, KitchenAid wanted to increase customer engagement, loyalty and lifetime value. To do that, they knew they needed to find opportunities to delight customers throughout their entire journey with the KitchenAid brand.

“But first,” explained Nicole, “we needed to better understand the current shopper and consumer experience journey, especially after the point of purchase.”

KitchenAid turned to SKIM to help them build a global framework defining the full scope of their consumer experience journey, including:

• The triggers, barriers, influences, behaviors and other factors that inspire consumers during each phase of the shopper and post-purchase journey
• Which touchpoints and journey(s) KitchenAid should prioritize
• KitchenAid’s opportunities to meet consumer expectations during the purchase journey and engage customers post-purchase

The journey research solution

SKIM’s research provided KitchenAid with a validated, comprehensive view of the global small appliance consumer journey, as well as a process to guide stakeholders in making the right business decisions to achieve their goals.

Elizabeth explained SKIM’s research approach, analytics, and the insights-activation process:

A winning research combination

To create a single source of truth about small appliance buyers, SKIM designed and implemented complementary research phases that balanced real-world considerations with methodological robustness:

• A quantitative survey
• Two qualitative phases involving in-depth interviews, online and in-store shopping videos and unboxing interviews

Sifting through the messy journey with the right data

Today’s consumer journey is non-linear and can include a variety of online and offline touchpoints. SKIM applied its advanced Journey Modeling^TM technique to make sense of the data and uncover the hidden nuggets Nicole and the KitchenAid team needed to:

• Identify the frequency, sequence, importance, and relevance of online and offline touchpoints, pre and post purchase
• Define pre-purchase and post-purchase journey groups
• Prioritize the key journeys KitchenAid should focus on using an opportunity score

Engaging stakeholders

To ensure that the project produced actionable insights to guide decision-making, SKIM included multiple touchpoints with KitchenAid stakeholders, such as Consumer Insights, Brand Marketing, Consumer Experience and regional Marketing teams throughout the process:

• Goal alignment workshop: Determined research objectives and reviewed prior research
• Stakeholder discovery: Reviewed quantitative findings and collaborated on journey groups
• Activation workshop: Brainstormed ideas and created a strategic action plan based on the research results

“SKIM’s activation approach helped us transform insights into action and align on a path forward,” said Nicole,

“By bringing stakeholders together at each stage, we were able to define goals, set priorities, and decide how to apply the learnings from the journey research, and get leadership on board all in real time. We are already reaping the benefits of the decisions we made.”

Outcomes: Insights activation delivers a positive impact

With detailed information about what exactly drives consumers’ decisions and their ongoing experience with the brand, KitchenAid was able to hone in on the most critical steps they needed to take right away.

1. Identified short-term opportunities with unboxing and in-store experiences
2. Developed global strategy & prioritization for pre- and post-purchase consumer experience
3. Implemented ongoing metrics to track customer satisfaction globally

One example was improving unboxing and in-store experiences (discovered through consumer interviews and in-store videos) to build engagement and loyalty.

The insights also guided KitchenAid’s stakeholders in the development of a global strategy for improving consumer experience both before and after purchase, as well as ongoing metrics to track customer satisfaction around the world.

KitchenAid General Manager Dan Valenti summed up the outcome of the project:

“This research really helped us better understand the consumer experience and identify ways that we can delight them.”

3 important learnings

Closing the discussion at the Corporate Researchers Conference, our presenters had some parting lessons and learnings for the audience:

1. Including both qualitative and quantitative research to unlock important insights about the consumer experience.
2. Reconstructing individual journeys and using modeling and clustering helped identify commonalities and key segments.
3. Considering the entire journey allowed us to spot opportunities to surprise and delight consumers.

How are you creating delightful brand experiences for  consumers?

The past few years have brought unprecedented shifts in purchase behavior, with more complicated journeys, more online and offline touchpoints, new channels and influences, and more choices than ever before. To win the battle for consumer loyalty, brands are recognizing the need to understand and improve post-purchase experiences as part of the end-to-end consumer journey.

SKIM can help your brand expand your journey research, bring journeys to life with robust analytics and develop activation strategies that achieve your goals.

If you need to keep up with the changes and optimize your strategy with data-driven insights, schedule a consultation with one of our consumer journey experts.